Jill DuffyAmazon Cloud DriveAmazon Cloud Drive is an online storage service for your data, with a focus on photos. While it's generous with space for backing up images, a dearth of features leaves it behind many other excellent contenders.

Amazon Cloud Drive is an online storage service for your data, with a focus on photos. While it's generous with space for backing up images, a dearth of features leaves it behind many other excellent contenders.

If you think of Amazon Cloud Drive as a boutique service for backing up only your photos and nothing else, it's a wonderful and simple solution. Want enough space to store all those pictures from family birthday parties, vacations, and holidays? Amazon has you covered. Amazon Prime members get unlimited storage for images, and non-members can pay just $11.99 per year for the same privilege. But Amazon Cloud Drive is supposed to do more, and the problem is it doesn't—at least not nearly as well as many other cloud-based backup and storage solutions. It doesn't offer file-syncing, for example, so forget about having on-device access to the latest version of all your documents and images. Nor does it offer automated backup. Cloud Drive has limited sharing capabilities, no collaboration features, and a desktop application that's fairly worthless.

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However, if you're in the market for a dedicated photo backup solution and nothing more, Amazon Cloud Drive has a sweet deal. If you're an Amazon Prime member for other reasons, you'll probably want to make use of all that included space. But if you need a comprehensive file-syncing and backup solution with editing and collaboration tools built-in, you'll want Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, which are both Editors' Choices. If you want syncing and unlimited, automated backup, IDrive can serve you well. And if you'd rather upload your photos to a more photo-specific service, don't forget Flickr's free terabyte of space. Flickr has mobile apps with auto-upload features, too, just as Amazon Cloud Drive does.

Price and PlansWhen Amazon began offering the unlimited storage plan for photos (March 2015), it did not shine a light on the fact that older plans, including a free 5GB plan, would get 86ed if customers didn't start paying. It's in some fine print that's worth reading. By comparison, just about every cloud storage provider offers free space, with Google and Microsoft the most generous, both offering 15GB for nothing.

If you're interested in the new unlimited storage plans from Amazon, you can get a free three-month trial just by signing into your Amazon account and hitting up the Cloud Drive page. Note that a Cloud Drive account is always tied to an Amazon account.

For a mere $11.99 per year, Amazon will give you unlimited photo storage, plus 5GB of space for videos and other files. If you have an Amazon Prime account, unlimited photos plus 5GB is included in your membership. All this space is for backing up your files, not syncing them. And by "back up," we're talking about putting a one-time copy of a file into the cloud, not continuous backup or scheduled backups, like you get with a dedicated backup program such as IDrive or SOS Online Backup (another PCMag Editors' Choice).

Increase your annual Amazon Cloud Drive payment to $59.99, and Amazon removes the ceiling on all your limits: unlimited storage for everything. That's the same price as IDrive, which also offers unlimited space, but comes with many more features that really add value.

Apps and FeaturesAmazon Cloud Drive has desktop apps for Mac and Windows computers, plus mobile apps for Android and iOS. More importantly, Cloud Drive is built into Fire phones, similar to how Apple iCloud Drive is built into iPhones and iPads and OneDrive is built into Windows Phones. Amazon Cloud Drive is also built into Amazon Fire TVs and the Amazon Instant Video app for other smart TVs and supported devices, so that you can see your photos on the very biggest of screens.

I installed the Mac desktop app but found it to be pretty much useless, and the Windows application mirrors it in this. The app lets you drag and drop files into an uploader to make a copy of them in your Amazon Drive Account, and there's a one-touch button for downloading all your files from the cloud, should you need to restore them. But you can get that functionality, plus a lot more, from the Web app. It's better to just use the Web app entirely and not bother installing the desktop apps at all.

The Web app has an uploader tool that supports drag-and-drop uploading, too. It's fast. I uploaded six short videos weighing in at 166MB together, and Amazon Cloud Drive sucked them up fast (I was using a wired Ethernet connection). You can upload entire folders this way as well.

In the Web app, you can create folders to organize your files, rename files, move them around, and so forth. Because Amazon Cloud Drive doesn't offer scheduled backups or file-syncing, you won't find any file-versioning.

As mentioned, the Amazon Cloud Drive handles photos better than anything else. From the Web app, you can view all your photos. This is similar to how Dropbox works on the Web. With Amazon Cloud Drive, when you hover over a thumbnail image, a slightly larger image appears, helping you see more detail. You can also see your images in a near-full screen slideshow. Even the slideshow is mediocre, though, because there isn't a preview strip at the bottom to tell you where you are in the slideshow. You have no idea how many more images there are to go until you hit the end. You also don't get to see photo metadata (camera, lens, exposure, and so on) as you do in Flickr, let alone that service's social photo-community features.

If you're looking at videos you've uploaded among all your files in list view, they don't seem playable, but in fact they are. Once you open a left-side collapsible menu and choose Photos & Video, the videos appear as tiles, similar to your photos, and they become playable in the Web app.

Documents get the short end of the stick in Amazon Cloud Drive. You can't see a preview of your documents or add notes to them, which you can do with the very capable file-syncing program Box. And when it comes time to share a file or two, you can do so via email or by copying a public link, but you can't share entire folders, and there are no options for password-protecting the shared data or putting other security wrappers on it, like you can with SpiderOak. Needless to say, Amazon Cloud Drive doesn't have any file-editing or creation tools, though you can get those in Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box.

The mobile apps for iOS and Android do have an automatic image uploader tool, again showing Amazon Cloud Drive's strength with images. When you turn it on, it automatically uploads new photos and other images from your phone or tablet. Auto-upload for images is a fairly standard feature in file-syncing and backup mobile apps, though, so it's hardly a unique feature that you can't get elsewhere, notably from Box, Dropbox, Flickr, SugarSync, and IDrive.

Good for Backup with a Prime AccountMy feeling about Amazon Cloud Drive is that it's a decent way to back up photos if you are already an Amazon Prime member. And maybe it should house your secondary, rather than primary, data backup. If you edit images at all, you'll want a true file-syncing or backup service that will save different versions of your files and always have the most recent version up to date on all your devices. Moreover, if you need any kind of features for documents at all, you're much better served by a full collaborative suite with file-syncing and backup, such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, which are both Editors' Choices.

Amazon Cloud Drive

Bottom Line: Amazon Cloud Drive is an online storage service for your data, with a focus on photos. While it's generous with space for backing up images, a dearth of features leaves it behind many other excellent contenders.

About the Author

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital forma... See Full Bio

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's S... See Full Bio

Amazon Cloud Drive

Amazon Cloud Drive

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